Getting started with OpenGL

Given two tuples of coordinates and two radii, I want to draw two spheres. This sounds very simple, but I would like to use OpenGL nevertheless because later on I am going to add significant complications to this basic thing. However, it turns out I do not even know how to draw a sphere. To be more precise, I am having trouble just getting OpenGL to work. I was trying to do some tutorials using the openGL programming guide 8th ed., but turns out Mac OS only supports up to 4.1, so now I am using windows 7, where I have openGL 4.3 installed. I tried to use the first code sample (triangle.cpp), but g++ is refusing to compile it, unsurprisingly, because it cannot resolve the imports. I assume I need to set some paths somewhere for OpenGL, but the programming guide doesn't tell you how to do that. How can I set up the paths?

TL;DR Complete newbie to OpenGL, just want to get any extremely simple program that uses OpenGL successfully running, on Windows 7.